I don't know if anyone else here has had as much bad luck as I have, but the past few weeks with Claro have been very frustrating.

Constant dropped calls and loss of signal. I can go from five bars with 3G to 'Searching...' in a few seconds without moving. I have gone as much as 20 minutes without signal at times, in a place I normally have good reception.

I purchased the wireless modem a while back, after asking about it here. It turned out to be useless. Even with good signal strength I was never able to log onto a single web page or read a single email. $15 wasted.

Apparently there are two separate accounts I can pay into for prepaid service. One for calling the US, and one for local calls. The rep didn't tell me this and when I would recharge my saldo, they just kept adding to my US account. I wound up with no local service and $59 available for calling the US. And no, I can't transfer any money over from one side to the other, so I am stuck with a lot of saldo that I will never be able to use up before I return stateside.

The last straw was this week. I bought $20 worth of saldo and somehow used it all up in a day without making any calls. When I went to ask about it they claimed my phone must have gone through a major software update and used up my data (it didn't). I recharged with another $30 and made sure to get a 15 day data plan for $8. After going through the steps to activate the data plan I still managed to run through all of the saldo in less than 48 hours, with one phone call. When I went back to the store for the 4th time, the rep said there was nothing he could do for me, refused to make any kind of credit or refund, and said that the manager was out at lunch.

I go to El Salvador pretty often and I'd say tigo is the best. (still sucks) but is good though. It's you always get extra saldo bonus to call the US and canada every now and then which is cool. Also you can use google coice if you have an android phone (think is free to call to the US)

Thanks. I've still got a big balance for calling the US, so I have resorted to using the Skype forwarding numbers for my main contacts down here. That still costs me an extra 15.9 cents per minute, but it's better than nothing. And I found some nearby wifi hotspots for data. I still can't send any text messages though.

Chiming in with some technical knowledge that will explain an issue with many GSM carriers in Central America.

America Movil (The big Mexican telecommunications company) deployed TDMA/GSM/EDGE/HSPA+ on the 1900mhz frequency. Why? That I'm not sure, but at that frequency, signal is not that great and penetration definitely isn't.